The field of the disclosure relates generally to methods and system for adaptive merchant recommendations and, more particularly, to methods and system for recommending items for future purchase by a consumer based on the consumer's historical actions.
Consumers today are provided with an increasing number of segments of goods and services that are available, as well as, an increasing number of merchants available in each segment (also known as a category). A segment is a group of merchants offering similar goods or services, such as a dining segment, an electronics segment, an automobile segment, and a clothing segment. For example, in many cities, consumers have hundreds if not thousands of restaurant options to select from in the dining segment when they are ready to eat. Moreover, even when the restaurant options are narrowed by restaurant category or cuisine, there may still be an overwhelmingly large number of restaurant options presented to the candidate consumer.
In some cases, merchants try to predict future purchases that consumers will make and provide tailored recommendations (i.e., advertisements) for those future purchases. For example, some websites will recommend to visitors a new purchase to be made by the visitor. In some cases, these recommendations are based on past purchases made by the candidate consumer or by other website visitors. For example, if other consumers have purchased from merchants A, B, C, and D, while the candidate consumer in questions has made purchases from merchants A, B, and C then these known systems will likely determine that the candidate consumer has a high propensity to purchase from merchant D. However, these known system lack the ability to incorporate a time aspect (i.e., when the purchases occurred and an relative amount of time between purchases), and further require the central server to have access to a customer's personal information. Therefore, these known systems may continue to recommend merchant D for a period of time after the connection between A, B, C, and D is no longer relevant.